Make Money Travel Blogging

Colm recently asked me to participate in the So you want to be a travel blogger post on Hostelworld.com’s blog.

I was happy to, and — when looking for inspiration — I realised that relationships are king. (more…)

Craig and Linda with some Australians, a 2010 famil trip on Kangaroo Island

Make Money Travel Blogging is going to see fresh content, fresh ideas, and a renewed emphasis on talking about the travel blogging industry and community, while helping you meet your goals.

What are your goals for 2011? Mine are currently scrawled on a piece of paper that I found during a long bus trip somewhere between Adelaide and Alice Springs. I need to refocus on core projects. They are:

• Indie Travel Podcast
• Art of Solo Travel
• Art of Couples’ Travel
• Seriously Board
• Make Money Travel Blogging

And a new, secret project that should be launched in Q3 if not before.

For each of these projects I’ve got goals for marketing, money and community. Have you taken the time to set your goals for 2011? Have you broken them into monthly or quarterly goals and come up with some short-cuts or plan Bs if things don’t work out?

If not, grab a napkin and a pen, wipe the beer off it, and jot down some thoughts. You’ll be able to firm them up over the next week.

Oh, and welcome to 2011! I look forward to catching up with you all on the road.

Why does it feel so dirty to write about making money?

I’ve been writing Make Money Travel Blogging for a few months now. It’s a hobby for me; a good chance to talk shop and share what I’m learning. Sure, I’m recommending products with affiliate links, so it’s a business in that sense, but there’s no editorial calendar, no planning, no business plan.

But for some reason, writing about money feels dirty.

Whether I’m talking about how much we made when we changed x for y, how to make money with a travel blog, or reviewing one of the dozen courses and ebooks available, I get these guilty twinges from time to time.

I have no idea why this would be, but there must be some cultural taboo buried in my subconscious on the topic. What do you think? Should we be talking money like this?

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all your early support of Make Money Travel Blogging — it really has been amazing. I’ve been struggling to balance our main websites with some casual teaching work recently and, as this is really a hobby at this stage, it’s taken a back foot.

I have been building out a site as part of Corbett’s Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, which is now live: MatadorU Review has a review of the MatadorU writing course, with one on photography soon to follow. Let’s see how it goes, as it’s a step-by-step following of Corbett’s programme. He recommends building several of these, but I’m going to slow down on them and fit them in around other work. A great exercise in research, tight writing, and starting a small niche site aimed at affiliate earnings.

You should check out Corbett’s course if you’re new to affiliate marketing. The holiday season buying will begin soon and you want to be in position for that. I’m holding off on my review until I see how this site grows.

I think one of the biggest questions when it comes to making money with a travel blog is, how much money do you need?

This questions governs how much time you spend looking for ways to make money, how many sales “pitches” or pieces you need each month, and even what kind of content you create.

The hobby blogger

The hobby blogger has a day job or independent wealth. Making money on this travel blog might be nice, but there’s no pressing need. It’d be nice to cover domain costs (let’s say US$15 a year, which is a little high) plus hosting on Bluehost or Hostgator, two very fine options for a small- to medium- sized blog. (Both also have auto-installers for WordPress, which is great!)

This blogger needs to make less than US$10 a month to happily cover all his or her costs. It doesn’t matter how quickly this blogger gets paid; there’s no pressing need to cover the bills.

Strategy one: Use a few, highly targeted and commission-based affiliate networks liberally throughout the blog. Build in Amazon text links, for example, into every blog post. People needn’t be “sold” by your posts, but the cookies dropped when they click through will keep you ticking over.

Strategy two: Find one high-commission product that fits perfectly with your site and advertise it enough to make five sales a year. That’s all; five sales on a $25 commission will have you home and hosed without any hard selling or big advertising campaigns. Sell two copies of Art of Solo Travel a month and you’re covered too. How do you do this?

• 1. Buy the product! You could also ask for a review copy if you have an existing audience.
• 2. Write an honest review. If you’ve chosen your product well, it’ll be a good fit for your readers — but tell them what’s bad about it too.
• 3. Include affiliate links in your review; one near the start, one in the middle, one near the end. Vary the wording of the links.
• 4. Promote your review through links in future articles, a sidebar panel (“Popular posts” for example), and your social media channels.

Once you have your sales, you’ve covered your costs and you can stop promoting it or keep promoting it as you wish.

The budget traveller

The budget traveller is in need of some more cash, probably around $30 a day in order to cover all her costs — that’s taking into account some time in Vietnam and a week in Stockholm over the year. Around US$1,000 a month? That’s a fair chunk of money and needs some much more sophisticated and consistent sales.

Strategy one: Start with the two ideas above, then rinse and repeat. Affiliate promotions are scalable and, when the products match your audience, amazingly powerful. Sign up to affiliate programmes for your favourite online stores — ensure they’re ones your audience can or does use too — then start linking to one or two in every post.

Use both the small- and big- commission items in tandem. Run a major affiliate push — review and promotion — around once a month and ensure you’re linking back to and promoting older affiliate pushes during the year.

Strategy two: If you don’t like affiliate advertising, then try selling ad space. This might be in the form of banner ads, text links or paid-for content. Whatever you do here, never sell space forever: it’s like a newspaper — people pay for every “issue” of a paper; they can pay regularly to be a part of your site content too.

What to charge for travel blog advertising? Watch the video.

Strategy three: Where appropriate, add in other advertising income sources, like Image Space Media, Google Adwords, Kontera. Consider only showing these to “drive-by” search engine visitors using a WordPress plugin like Ozh Who Sees Ads.

Strategy four: Ask your audience for donations, through a Paypal button or subscription service. Depending on your site’s audience, you might make it lucky with this one. Some sites exist primarily on the donations from their readership … something like an NPR model with gifts for big donors keeps people thinking high.

With a reasonably sized audience, this combination of strategies to make money travel blogging can add up. The trick is balancing every money-making opportunity with your reader’s expectations of the site, and their experience.

If you keep your readership coming back, you’ll be able to find a way to stay on the road through them.

It all comes back to how much you need to make. If you do nothing else, figure out how much that is today. And if you do something else, it’s to tell us your strategies in the comments.

Gary might be one of Time’s 25 bloggers of 2010 (but who reads paper anyway?).

Matt might now be writing for AOL and HuffPo (but who wants more work?).

*I* got featured in Skymall!

OK, not really featured. More … quoted.

OK, OK! It’s freakin’ Skymall! Mike Barish, I want a feature.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get a more ridiculous offer this month, but $10 for ~10,000 organically-driven, targeted views sounds pretty ridiculous to me. And that’s not taking into account growth over the coming months…

Travel bloggers, let’s not race each other into poverty. Turn down stupid offers (and yes, $1 for ~1,000 views is bad; hell, $2 for ~1,000 views is as low as I’d be interested in going).

Ridiculousness

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:51 PM, x (y@z.com> wrote:
Hello,

I found your site while searching Google and have found your website
information and advice to be a very good fit for our visitors. As such, we
are interested in buying advertising space on your home page

http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/

Our budget is within $10/month. If you are interested, please send me your
rate per month and PayPal information.

If we are happy with your price we will send you the link details that you
can place on your website and we will make the payments to the PayPal ID
provided.

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

x

Reply:

Hi x,

I’m afraid advertising at this price isn’t really the style of thing we’re interested in.

When you have a budget of $25+ a month, let me know and we can discuss advertising on some of my other sites. If you have a budget of $80+/month we can talk about http://indietravelpodcast.com.

Thanks,
Craig Martin

It looks like I’m going to be posting here 2-3 times a week, including videos and other random things that pop up.

I originally planned to have a monthly Make Money Travel Blogging newsletter, but I think that, now, it would be overly full of stories and wouldn’t allow me to react quickly to opportunities and stories as they come up.

The question is:

And, if you want, please comment on what you’d like to see in Make Money Travel Blogging emails. Ideally, in my mind, I’d be offering a little more “behind the scenes” stories and special deals for you special people.

If you’re not on the mailing list, join in using the forms in the sidebar or below this post.

Ignoring the annoying use of URI as a given name (not like it’s difficult to find on Indie Travel Podcast), what do you think about this?

I’m really interested: does anyone do this?

Feel free to comment anonymously below. If yes, what do you charge? If no, how do you feel about it?

Dear Indietravelpodcast.com,

I’m currently working with a xx company who interested in collaborating with your website. They are in the process producing an article about the best travel apps available, which will feature on their blog. Would you be interested in writing a post about this sort of thing and linking back to my client’s site? If so, what would your price be for this?

Let me know if you’re interested.

Many thanks,

X

Even a cursory look at our recent survey shows that travel blogging isn’t making many people rich. This is something I’m trying to change!

(And if you’re wondering, we fit into the midrange of $1,000-5,000 a month. Not enough to pay the bills for two people plus our business costs.)

That said, I’ve recently made a shocking discovery. I was making it really hard for people to give me money. Sounds stupid, right? It was.

This is me, looking stupid (because the sun was in my eyes, not because I didn't find a way to make money from every post)

I was researching which of my blog posts I’d like to increase in the search engine rankings. I was going to write some guest posts and ask some blogging friends for links. Maybe do a little article marketing on them.

As I was going through competitiveness factors and looking at where we were ranking off the first page of Google I realised pushing some posts up in the ranks was going to be hard. It would take time and money. I needed to prioritise my efforts.

The next question, of course, was: which posts are going to make me money?

The answer, when I flicked back through my most-recent 20 posts, was none of them. And that’s why we were struggling to make money. That might be why most travel bloggers are struggling to make money.

The answer: find a way for people to give you money in each post you write. This doesn’t need to be a hard-sell or a cheeky, audacious ploy. It could be a link to an affiliate partner (like Art of Solo Travel or Nomadic Matt’s ebook), a sign-up to your email list, a prominently placed banner ad.

Look back over your last 20 posts. Is there a way for your audience to give you money?

I’m working on a training programme about this for you, but it’s taking some time. It should be ready in August.

I’m going to walk through how you can find good advertisers and affiliate programmes and easily add those links to your exisiting backlog of posts. It’d take hours to do it manually, even if you’ve only been blogging for a few months. To be the first to know about it, subscribe to the mailing list using the form below.